Desk Decor Worth Going Into the Office For

The average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime.

If you haven't already jumped out of the window on hearing that fact, it's probably time to take a little look around at your desk, and work out if it's really the sort of place you want to be whiling away roughly ten and a half years of your life...

Home office decor has been a bit of an obsession of ours for a while now, evidenced by the fact that our Pinterest Home Inspiration Board is probably about 80% beautiful workspaces...

Images via: Pinterest

I've done the best glam up my work spaces at both home and in the office, so that sitting in front of my computer for hours on end is as pleasant as possible. 

Home office....

Office office (a work in progress)...

I've mixed in basics from Ikea and Muji with eBay finds (mini balloon animals and metal initial) and a couple of DIY bits and bobs (orchid in an old Diptyque jar and a free printable calendar from Jasmine Dowling). My latest new desk decor obsession though, is Danish interior design company, Ferm Living, which sells a gorgeous range of clean, contemporary Scandi pieces with a retro twist. When I started my new job I went on a little spree and just glancing through the new season collection has got my credit card twitching again. Browse the below at your peril... 

Ferm Living Letter Tray
€42

Ferm Living Brass Semi-Circle Stand

€81.88

Ferm Living Brass Cup

€25

Ferm Living Treasure Diamond

€31

There's also (whisper it) a whole host of other homeware deliciousness for every  other room of your home. 

Oops, there goes this month's paycheck...

This Week The Mice Have Mostly Been...

... working, working and a bit more working in Hong Kong and packing-up and zipping off on holiday in London.

So, because HK Mouse is utterly useless (and a touch lazy) without her little co-Mice, today's post is going to be short and sweet. We're wishing you all a wonderful weekend and we'll see you on Monday for some proper blog love but right now...

x

The Mice

This Week The Mice Have Mostly Been

Well, at the risk of scaring you off before you've finished the first sentence, this week has been an incredibly, incredibly dull week in Miceland... 

Well, it has in Hong Kong anyway. This Mouse has mostly been slaving away over stacks and stacks and stacks of documents. I hate whinging, so I'm not going to. But, let's just say, I've been going to bed every night this week at the sorts of times you usually only see when you've had fifteen Jager Bombs and a round or six of vodka jelly shots... Which given that it's Rugby Sevens week in Hong Kong, is exactly what my week should have been filled with. 

But, no Rugby for me, as I type this, I'm currently on a little lunch break, the first I've taken this week, and one I'm only rewarding myself because I miss the blog and I have now been awake and working non-stop for twenty nine hours and counting - so I'm basically feeling like this...

But because blogging about wanting to sleep is even duller than whining about work, here's a very brief canter through what's been keeping me sane during a pretty hellish week...

Nails Inc Gel Effect Polish
£14
If you have to sit on a call at gone 10pm, you may as well be doing something useful while you're listening... And if you're going to spend the next six hours watching your fingers flying across a keyboard, they may as well be pretty! I did a bit of a Sephora minesweep while I was in New York last month (rest assured a full on beauty haul post is in the works) and this bad boy was one of many beauty bits I snapped up. This shade is Downtown - a deliciously juicy watermelon pink (I may also have popped the coral-tastic Kensington Passage in my basket too...). These aren't actual gel/shellac polishes (see the London Mice's post on DIY-Shellac brand, NK1, if that's what you're after) but they are super shiny and definitely look gel-esque on. Sadly, they don't quite last a couple of weeks like gel, but, as someone who usually gets chips a couple of hours after painting my nails, I can vouch for the fact that these last longer than your average polish. They are quite pricey, but the colours are fab and you get a gorgeously glossy salon-worthy mani - exactly what I needed on a desk bound, dull Wednesday!

Mermaid Candle
US$50
Another New York find, this time a luxe orange blossom scented candle which has been flickering away at the edge of my desk long into the night over the last few days. On our Williamsburg wanderings, we came across girlie heaven, Catbird nyc. While I was trying on stacks of rings and lusting over shelvesful of other pretty bit and bobs, I spied a candle called 'Mermaid' and was immediately smitten. One sniff and I was totally whipping-out-my-credit-card-quicker-than-you-can-say-'overdraft' sold! I'm now trying to eek it out for as long as humanly possible...

Pretty desk accessories

I zipped up to the flower market in Prince Edward a couple of weeks ago and couldn't resist picking up an orchid from a little shop stuffed to bursting with every conceivable variety. The pot it came in was a bit of an eyesore, so as soon as I got home I whipped him out of his old home out and planted him in an old Diptyque candle pot - a much chicer new pad! He now sits right beside my laptop and makes me happy whenever I catch a glimpse of him!  

And a Little Bit of YSL Love 
I first blogged about these YSL Love Postcards almost two years ago and I've finally got round to framing and hanging them above my desk. The perfect eye candy for work-weary peepers! 

I got my set courtesy of the very lovely Mandy in Morocco who if you ask her very nicely will ship you your very own postcard-shaped scraps of love wherever you are in the world!

Elizabeth & James Nirvana White

US$22

And let's end on a sweet note - yet another NYC purchase - Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen's new perfume Nirvana White. The Fashionista sisters' new fragrance line comes in two varieties, a daytime White and a darker, sultrier, Black. I got drawn in by the adult version of sweets at the till while I was queuing to pay for the contents of my groaningly full Sephora shopping basket and snapped up this clutch-friendly rollerball version of White. I now wish I'd bagged the bigger version, I can't get enough of this clean, fresh peony amazingness - it's like spritz of spring whenever I spray it!

And with that I'm off to make a little bit more of a dent into the mountains of paperwork littering my desk... And then my friends, I have some pretty exciting Friday night plans which look a lot like this...

Happy Weekend!

x

The Mice

The World Would Be A Better Place if...

...there was an invention to negate the every day work-related bugbears that drive us all a bit mental! And is there a worst time of the week for work's little annoyances to spring up than on a Wednesday slap bang in the centre of your mid-week slump?! If I were to pick two of my biggest annoyances that affect me on a day-to-day basis, they would without doubt be:

1. Filling in timesheets, attributing every minute of every day to a task or client; and 

2. Listening to bad music played out via the shared office Spotify account.

If only they were inventions of some kind that would soften the blow or offer some kind of solution to these daily niggles? Well i'm pleased to say my prayers have been answered with the following two beauties...

Free beer Friday when the office timesheets for the week are all completed! Genius and totally addresses my first loathe! I personally can't think of a better form of motivation than an alcohol-fuelled bribe! It's simple, there is a fridge in the centre of the office, full to the brim of icy cold beer which is electronically locked. This fridge of dreams is connected to the office timesheet programme which automatically unlocks once all office timesheets have been submitted for the week - watch below for the full story...

So that's the timesheet dilemma dealt with! Next up how to tackle co-workers bad taste in music?! Well i've found just the trick ... The Change The Tune interactive poster which is connected to Spotify and allows you to change a tune by simply throwing something at it! So let me set the scene, 'Gangnam Style' starts blaring out of the office speakers, you shiver with disgust and put your head in your hands BUT with the poster hung on your office wall, those days are loooooong gone. The poster is essentially a target, so as soon you hear the words Oppan Gangnam Style simply take a ball of paper and throw it at the poster - hey presto Spotify will skip to the next track. Not to get all techy on you but the back of the poster hosts a knock sensor that registers the paper hitting the front and passes a signal through to the Spotify computer moving the music track on by one! Amazepaperballs right?! Check it out below...

That's it for my Wednesday pearls of wisdom - I think we've all learnt something here! Next up tackling world peace...!